To me, any improvement in rakudo's speed is good news. I think if rakudo could be about as fast as Perl 5, more Perl 5 people would start using it, even if it's not complete yet. Then we'd have more people helping the development of rakudo, and eventually we'd have a full implementation.

There was a Perl 6 conference lately, called The need for speed, and I think the speaker totally nailed it with his title. Perl 6 is quite well implemented now (still much to do but the most part is here), but now it really needs speed.